Read Three Sisters for Free Online Page B

boy and a girl. They live with their mother in Spain. She—Lara—went there a few years ago. It’s awful for him, he never gets to see his kids and he misses them a lot.”
    “Then why doesn’t he go live there?”
    Their voices notched up another decibel.
    “Tobi, you’re getting in over your head.”
    “It’s my life.”
    “You’re not even nineteen—”
    “I told you! My age has nothing to do with it.”
    Stop it, Karen said. Stop. It. She thought she said it. Maybe she just imagined saying it. Her mother at the table, her hand over her mouth. Tobi leaning against the refrigerator, face glowing with anger and tears.
    And just then they heard her grandmother calling, “Sylvia? Arnold? I’m here.”
    “So there you are,” her grandmother said, as Karen came into the front hall. She was waiting by the staircase to be received. A real lady.
    “How are you, Grandma?” Karen kissed her soft, bristly cheek.
    “Are you working hard in school?”
    “Yes, Grandma.”
    “You have to work, Karen. You can’t be lazy.”
    “Yes, Grandma.”
    Her grandmother straightened her hat, a classy-looking felt fedora with a wide brim and a dark band.
    Mrs. Freed, or Hattie, as she prefers to be called, is never seen anywhere, anyplace, anytime, without a hat. Quote unquote a newspaper article, written about twenty years ago and now hanging, framed, in her grandmother’s living room.
    One way or another, she had been making hats since she was a girl. “I used to make hats out of nothing, a bit of ribbon and a little scrap of material. I went to work as a milliner when I was fifteen; I had to help out my family.” Later, she had become a hat designer for a big manufacturer. And much later still, she had opened her own shop, Creations
    by Hattie. “A dream come true,” she had told the reporter.
    Now, with the fedora, she wore a draped midnight blue dress, a string of blue glass beads, and matching blue stone earrings. She had a big, deep voice and big, fat, strong arms. An impressive woman. Even her earlobes were impressive, large and thick, fleshy as thumbs.
    “Too bad none of you take after your father,” she said. Grandma’s lament. “Arnold was an exceptional student. Do you know that he went to medical school when he was only nineteen?”
    “Yes, Grandma.”
    “Brilliant. A brilliant boy. He could have been a surgeon. Of course you three girls are bright enough,” she said, sounding regretful at having to concede so much. Tobi had once said that if their father had been able to conceive and give birth to the three of them on his own, a holy male birth, without their mother’s taint, their grandmother would think they were brilliant, too.
    Karen followed her grandmother into the living room, brought her the fruit tray, showed her the new issue of the school paper. She had a photo in it of a blue jay sitting on a roof of a house next to a TV antenna. “Very nice,” her grandmother said. Karen winced. Why had she trotted the paper out? When she developed the photo she had thought it inspired, a satiric comment on modern life. Now it seemed banal, even pointless.
    Her grandmother sat upright in the chair, her eyes bright, looking around to see if anything had changed since the previous Sunday. “I’m seventy-six,” she
    liked to tell people. “I look much younger. People are amazed when they hear my age.”
    Karen’s mother came in. “Mother Freed, hello.” She kissed the older woman. “Dinner’s almost ready.” Then everyone else appeared. Tobi kissed her grandmother. Liz was there and stepped up. “How are you, Grandma?” She hugged her and Grandma patted Liz’s face. Everyone got in line, even Scott. Jason smiled under his mustache. Hang around a while, Karen thought, you’ll be kissing her, too.
    Grandma beckoned to Jason. “A teacher? At the college?”
    “Teaching’s a sideline,” Jason said. “Cruel necessity. I’m an artist.”
    Grandma pursed her lips fastidiously. “I don’t suppose